Cleaning up the garbage

Recently, this site has received a lot of attention due to a series of pieces Paul has authored regarding the research by a certain professor into document forgeries. I have avoided any sort of involvement in this topic. I did this for two reasons: 1) I’ve been insanely busy at work (50-60 hours a week, 2 days total off since Labor Day) and haven’t had the time/energy to give it its proper attention, and B) the matter is so far out of my reach I’d be a vain idiot to even attempt to give it any credible attention.

But ever since Kevin and Paul started toning down the story, this site has received more and more attention. It peaked this morning (so far) when one particularly determined twit decided to post the same comment (with an occasional variation or two, proving that even he finds himself boring) 28 times to nearly EVERY SINGLE PIECE on the main page, and possibly more.

Wizbang isn’t my site, the story isn’t mine, and I have huge philosophical problems with just deleting comments (besides spam, of course) to my pieces. But this particular moron (whom, I believe, is a DSL customer of Ameritech’s in Plano, Texas, but again I digress) spent three hours committing the cyber version of grafitti all over this site. But when decided to toss his profanity-laden vomit on MY pieces as well, that made it my concern.

This is addressed directly to the moron, who I am sure is looking to see what kind of attention he gets (much like a little boy who peed on the living room carpet just before company arrives): I deleted your spam from my postings. I didn’t clean up the mess you left on Paul and Kevin’s pieces; that’s not my prerogative. But if you crap up any more of MY work, I will be forced to take further action.

Good for you Jay! I enjoy the pieces of everyone who post here and the opinions of SOME who comment. It is a shame that a few see fit to muddy up the water by a lack of maturity. This is clearly a case of someone who has nothing better to do than act like a 5 year old having a tantrum in the middle of Mommy and Daddy’s dinner party.

Kerry is the technical or customer service contact, I believe. Just because the IP falls into an Ameritech block does not mean the user/perp is actually “owner” even temporarily of that IP address, by the way. Could be someone running a zombie or flat spoofing the IP address. But it’s a good bet it is someone there and Ameritech can ID at least the computer involved.

Seeing as the bots were out last night spamming the online polls, it’s safe to assume some people with SOME hacking skills were in play on the Dem side. As usual.

I stopped agonizing over “censorship” a long time ago. My blog is my private property, and anyone who decides to use it for “graffiti”, as you put it, is going to have their scrawlings painted over and their ip kicked down to the end of the block.

Sure, they often log in under different ip’s and start over, so I just silently remove those too. Without the positive reinforcement of acknowledgement (the only mistake I see is that you’ve gone out of your way to explain your actions) they generally move on. There’s no need to explain it to regular commentors. If they’ve seen the troll posts, they’ll know why and where they went.

I’ve noticed that sort of thing on my own blog — I finish discussing something and move on, and a month or so later, I’m getting more and more comments. It happened with the Bill Cosby thing, and it’s still happening with the Cameron Diaz thing.